POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin sits with his back to the Fourth Bridge's railing, watching Hearthstone dwindle to discarded crab shells beneath the ship and feeling almost nothing about it. He took broth from one of the ardents because the ardent thought he was a refugee, and the Stormlight surging in his veins feels wan. He keeps replaying the burning cellar — *why didn't I kill him?* — and Moash's soft litany about everyone he loves dying anyway. Syl flies up first as a tiny airship she does not really belong inside, then in her stately dress, then in her usual flowing one — smaller than normal — and tells him plainly what he has been hiding from her: the darkness in him is worse when his Light runs out, and lately it stays even when the Light does. *I told him things, back in better days,* he says of the Honor Chasm. She does not argue. She tells him he freezes when he hears Windrunners have died, and asks how to help, and he tells her — joking and not joking — that if she ever figures it out, she should explain it to him too.
Teft crosses from the celebrating crowd around Laran — the Windrunner who spoke the Third Ideal in the burning manor — and tells him to get up and congratulate the girl, because she needs to see his approval. Kaladin is highmarshal; Teft is still his sergeant, and any officer worth his chips knows when to do what his sergeant says. He stands tall, has Laran call up her fresh Blade so he can recognize it, acknowledges the spren. He performs the unshaken commander part for them; Teft notes — carefully — that Renarin found him kneeling without a weapon, *again*, and lets the word hang. Afterwards Kaladin takes off with Dalinar and the command staff for the Plains, glad for the rushing wind that makes Teft stop asking questions.
In her round padded travel-pod, Navani both loves and detests contradictions; they testify to a logical order, and they whisper that her knowledge is incomplete. The suppressor Lift sent up — four garnets in an unfamiliar metal cage, no captive spren she can find — looks unsettlingly like the crystal pillar at Urithiru's core in miniature. *Possibly the reverse?* she writes in the margin: a way to suppress the Fused. The deeper contradiction is the Soulcaster itself, the device everyone has always called divine because it broke the rules of every other fabrial — but in Shadesmar she can now see one, and inside it a small unresponsive spren with its eyes closed, Radiant-shaped, intelligent. Held captive between realms, made to power the device. So much about the airship is just smaller fabrials lashed together; if she can reproduce whatever the ancients did to power the tower, every coalition army eats forever and the sky is full of Fourth Bridges.
Her pod trembles on landing and a faint pulsing red light catches her eye. Stuck to the underside of her table with a smear of wax is half a ruby — a spanreed's other half, planted there. She fits it into one of her own reeds the moment the Windrunners set her down at Narak. *Halt — at once,* the pen writes back, cramped and fervent, naming her a monster, accusing her of jailing hundreds of spren inside her fabrials. Navani replies that the intelligent spren she has spoken to — including bonded honorspren — do not think the captured fabrial spren are people. *Their testimony is no longer worth anything,* the pen answers. It signs off without a name.
Without Windrunner support — they are needed on another front and Kaladin is *off on his own private campaign in Alethkar* — Shallan and Adolin ride a requisitioned carriage from the watch plateau on toward Narak. Shallan folds into Adolin's shirt as if she could fit inside it; he does not push, and she tells him the only-not-pushing makes it worse, because the more he trusts her the further the truths she is hiding feel. She lets Veil surface to say plainly what Adolin needs to hear: Ialai did not poison herself. A pinprick. Someone in the team did it. *Was it you, Veil?* No. *Even if it had been — was that not what needed doing?* He cannot say. Inside Shallan, something else is stirring — Formless, the persona she has sworn she will never let exist. The threat of it terrifies her, which is exactly the fuel it needs.
She tells Adolin the small piece she can: there is a separate organization, the Ghostbloods, distinct from the Sons of Honor Ialai led; they were the ones who sank the ship she was on with Jasnah; they killed Thanadal and Vamah and now Ialai. She reads from Ialai's palm-size notebook — a hidden ledger of Ghostblood vocabulary that Ialai's spies had snatched: Nalathis, Scadarial, Tal Dain, unfindable in any atlas; and circled, at the end, *Thaidakar — He leads them.* A title, Ialai noted, in a language she could not place. Adolin asks if they will hand it to Jasnah. *We will,* Shallan says. *Eventually.* What she does not tell him is that she is one of them, and that an inflection point is coming where she will not be able to keep pretending it is spying.